Jack
Vance in the 25th Century -- and Beyonda featureby Peter D Tillman

Lyonesse by Jack Vance: Suldrun's Garden (1983), The
Green Pearl (1985), Madouc (1989, World Fantasy Award 1990);
all reprinted in mass market paperback, all out of print.
***Get these books back in print!!***

Rating: "A+".

Lyonesse is, I think, Vance's masterpiece: a mannered, leisurely
faux-historical fantasy, set in the mythical Elder Isles (south of Ireland
and west of France) at about the time of Uther Pendragon.

"The dark musings of Suldrun's Garden shade into the
exuberant colours of The Green Pearl and then into the more intimate
amusements of Madouc, in a sequence that, more than any other
work of the 1980s, fulfils the true high potentials of the Fantasy genre."
-- Nick Gevers, "Lord
of Language, and Emperor of Dreams", infinity
plus, 2000
<http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/jvprofile.htm>

I'm rereading Lyonesse -- if you've missed it, you have a wonderful
treat in store -- and, aside from reminding you of the beauty and grace
of this masterwork, it strikes me that Lyonesse could be reinterpreted
as science fiction -- say, along the lines of Gene Wolfe's SF-as-fantasy
works, or indeed Vance's "true" SF:

Indistinguishable from magic?

Hans Moravec, in "Robot:
Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind" (1999, reviewed at Event Horizon)
speculates that ultimate machine-intelligences will someday be able
to simulate, well, pretty much everything that ever did, or could, happen:

"... in an ultimate cyberspace, the physical 10 exp 45 bits
of a single human body could contain the efficiently encoded biospheres
of a thousand galaxies... The expanding bubble of cyberspace... will
absorb astronomical oddities, geologic wonders, ancient Voyager spacecraft,
outbound starships, and entire alien biospheres. These entities may
continue to live and grow as if nothing had happened, oblivious to their
new status as simulations in cyberspace..."

As Moravec notes, this could have already happened: "Single original
events will be very rare compared to the indefinitely multiple cyberspace
replays... There is no way to tell for sure, and the suspicion that
we are someone else's thought does not free us from the burdens of life..."
And the replays could be endlessly varied, to cover all of the possibilities
of Alternate History, or indeed any fiction, as passing fancies strike
the vast, cool Intellects that have supplanted us....

Well. See also Frank Tipler's "Omega Point" speculations -- these ideas
show up pretty regularly in science fiction, notably in RC Wilson's
interesting Darwinia (1998, reviewed
elsewhere in infinity
plus). Heinlein played with fiction becoming "real" as well,
and his Glory Road (1963; Hugo 1964) is a masterpiece of SF-as-fantasy.
And Vinge's True Names (1981; Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards,
1982) is a wonderful tour of the pioneer stage in "ficton"-cyberspace.

Wheels within wheels....

So. Suppose for a moment that Lyonesse is an ultimate play-within-a-play
at the end of time. Outside -- if there is an outside -- the stars are
guttering out, the Earth is dying. Inside -- deep inside -- by the warm
atotechnic hearths of Haidion, a subatomic Suldrun plays out Vance's
immortal drama once again. It's real to her, to King Casmir, to Murgen,
to Shimrod. Suldrun's old nurse Ehirme shrieks in true agony in the
Peinhador as Zerling cuts out her tongue....

Shimrod "travels" to Irerly via deep-forensic reconstruction
of a malfunctioning VR-telepresence rig, c.2250: "The sheath of sandestin-stuff...
allowed sound, toice, and gliry to chafe against his flesh... Further,
the disks intended to assist perception were out of proper adjustment..."

Persilian, the magic mirror, is obviously an atotechnic simulation
of an early 25th-century Medieval-Revival computer-toy: "... in one
of its flippant moods, [Persilian] reflected the wall first upside-down,
then reversed left-to-right, then..." -- cf. any adolescent AI in the
literature.

I'm certainly not suggesting that Vance consciously wrote Lyonesse
as science fiction -- but then, there really isn't that much difference
between Vance's fantasy and SF anyway. His sfnal technology is almost
always sci-magical -- really, it's the apotheosis of the 1940s and '50s
pulp-consensus, polished to a high gloss and lapidary finish.

My point is simply that Vance's "magical" plot devices could be made
to work in our universe, about as well as the standard sfnal sci-tech
devices. Beneath Vance's baroque ruffles and flourishes beats the stout
heart of an engineer -- his training was in mining engineering [note
2] -- and he keeps the engineer's rational worldview throughout
almost all of his fiction.

Well, perhaps a poet-engineer.... and a marvelous writer. Truly SF's
"Lord of Language, and Emperor of Dreams". If you are new to Lyonesse,
I envy you.

But you'll have to hunt around for copies, because the Lyonesse
trilogy appears to be out-of-print worldwide. It's hard to believe that
Vance's masterwork, and one of the finest fantasies ever written, has
fallen out of print.

**Get these books back in print!!**

Notes

1) Working out Madouc's "true" sfnal relationship to Twisk is left
as an exercise for the (simulated) reader. [...back
to main text]

2) Suldrun is one of the few of Vance's works that features a mining
scene -- the secret tunnel-construction project at the fortress Poelitetz,
with mining techniques straight out of Agricola's late-medieval "De
Re Metallica". [...back
to main text]